


The Lab Sessions

by VinHampton



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:56:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VinHampton/pseuds/VinHampton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vin talks about her sessions in Holmes's lab.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lab Sessions

"Where is my bunsen burner?" he asks. He is all limbs, as always, and doing a hundred things at once. His phone is practically attached to his hand, thumb flitting around the touch screen, no doubt in contact with John to enquire about their next case; a half-finished sandwich sits in a plate to his right, long-forgotten (who needs food when you have intellectual sustenance to nourish you?); three leatherbound tomes detailing the human anatomy claim most of the space on the counter top. It was often said of Leonardo Da Vinci, considered one of the greatest geniuses in history, that not only was he ambidextrous, but that he could work with both hands simultaneously – writing with one and drawing with the other. 

This is certainly true of Sherlock. He is a joy to watch when he is at work. He texts with his left, draws diagrams in one of his black Moleskine notebooks with his right, and sustains a somewhat absent-minded conversation with me in the interim. If I am Kali, keeper of Shakti, goddess of death, then he is my Bhairava, my Shiva, my cosmic dancer, with six arms each caressing the assigned task. 

His elbows jut out at awkward angles and he squints slightly when he is concentrating. He looks like an unmade bed, but one I would gladly seek refuge in. His hair can only be described with one adjective: unruly. Loose curls tumble onto his forehead as he moves, Adam’s apple bobbing from time to time when he stops to speak with himself. I should buy him a hairband. I watch him, and pretend every time I blink it is a shutter which will somehow steal that image forever and burn it into my psyche. 

Never before have I been quite so glad to be an eidetiker. I would like to engage that unit of my mind and record him in so much detail that if I ever were to lose him, should I live, I could recreate the perfect likeness, down to the very last hair, down to the exact hues of the nebulae that are his eyes. 

“Vivienne, where is my Bunsen burner?” he repeats. 

“Between the iodine and the potassium permanganate,” I say. I only know this because of their colours – the iodine a deep, rich, Indian orange; the other a vibrant purple. I had not ever heard of, nor seen, potassium permanganate until I had watched him add it to water. He had uttered its name under his breath in acknowledgement of my presence – his continued mission to educate me in matters important to him – and I had tasted the name and committed it to memory. I gasped at the vivid colour and noted the name reminded me of pomegranates. Had he asked me to drink the striking solution, I would have gladly accepted, and resigned my eternity to the Hades of his laboratory, where I would not have surfaced even in summer and spring. Let the world go dark – this Persephone belongs in the Underworld. 

“Don’t dawdle in the doorway, Vivienne. It is unnerving. Come in and close the door behind you. We are to play with fire.” His voice is restrained, baritone. It entices me to enter his den. I hardly come into this room unless he invites me, although he has told me time and again that I am welcome in it. It does not feel complete without him in it. With him there, I often spend hours curled up in the armchair, reading while he works. 

The lab is an extension of the man. It is not an especially large room, although it is large enough. The far end is a wall on which we have put up bookshelves that extend from floor to ceiling. His medical books – some of them old, dusty, first editions, take pride of place at the eye-line, with the first editon Gray’s Anatomy I gave him as a Valentine’s Day present right in the centre. I know he often takes it down and spends hours poring over it, copying the diagrams. 

A small section of the bookshelves houses a collection of fairy tale anthologies, and a beautiful hardbound edition of the One Thousand and One Nights. I recall reading the stories as a child, and for a moment I think I would like to read them to my children one day. It is a sentiment quite foreign to me, and it is gone as quickly as it came. I choose not to dwell on it. 

An entire shelf is devoted to his notebooks. They are all black Moleskins, A4, and have been diligently sorted by date. He meticulously takes down things he finds interesting, the nibs of his pens worn down from mercilessly pressing down too hard to scratch out his scrawl. His diagrams are perfect and spare no detail. Executed with technical pencils, his lines are precise. He keeps journals on people he cares enough about. 

I have found the one he keeps on me. He does not know this. It is the thickest of all. He has diagrammed my hands in several positions, labelling them. There are drawings of me asleep, drawings of my eyes, drawings of my knees, drawings of my toes, my neck. He has calculated the curvature of my spine and diagnosed mild ‘lordosis’. He has tried to draw my heart based on the sound it makes as it beats, and what he knows of my medical history. A note beside this diagram reads: ‘Mistake to theorise without all the facts!!’ Drawings of my lips take up the most space, then my scars. He has written detailed notes about each. There are drawings of my vulva, which have changed from crude, general sketches and notes of his surprise at the “overwhelming sensitivity” of the clitoris. These are dated to the beginning of our intimacy, and over the months they evolve to painstakingly detailed drawings and observations so personal that reading them brought a flush to my cheeks. 

‘If I touch her waist with the flat of my palm, she hums an F#,’ starts one page. ‘Brushing the scar tissue on the small of her back with my fingers makes her thighs tense up. If I do this during intercourse, the contraction of these muscles so close to the groin cause her to orgasm noticeably faster than usual. Must be careful not to apply too much pressure for fear of hurting her. Only advisable when in control and compos mentis.’

As for my tattoos: he briefly makes a note of them but does not pay them much attention. The only tattoo he will continually allude to is the one he owns – the violin f-holes on my back. Several pages dated February 2013 are filled with drawings of my back from different angles. 

This journal would have disturbed me had I found it at the beginning of our relationship. I would have felt like a insect pinned to a board. Now I understand it is how Sherlock loves me. He studies me. There is not one word that has escaped my lips which he has not analysed and categorised. 

The rest of the lab is mostly clean and organised. There are wooden shelves and bookcases filled with little vials, neatly labelled. There are potions and poisons, jars filled with organs and small animals, small boxes filled with miscellaneous items – bones, branches, leaves, glass. It is overwhelming, and yet he has categorised each item in his ‘Mind Palace’. This is his home, this is his safe haven. Sherlock Holmes is more comfortable mixing volatile chemicals than mingling with people.

“Vivienne, don’t dawdle!” 

I walk up behind him and slip my arms around his waist. His shoulders relax as I plant a small kiss to the beauty mark on the back of his neck. 

“Put on these gloves,” he says. “And this mask.” I do as I am told. I always enjoy these teaching sessions. I am hungry to learn, and desire to know what he knows. I am, however, quite surprised as he opens a body bag to reveal a freshly-killed pig. We do not have a slab, and so we make do with the floor-tiles. I help him drag the dead animal onto the floor. 

“Porcine flesh, my Queen,” he says as he turns the pig over onto its back, a euphoric glint in his eye, “is the closest to human flesh in density and structure.” I run my hands over the pig’s rotund belly and the leathery skin and soft down remind me of so many men whose faces I have chosen to forget; whose pleas I will forever remember, and I have to agree. 

“I thought it might be beneficial for you to learn about burns,” he says. I trust him. This is my education, and while I have seen burn victims before, while I have inflicted burns, while burns have been inflicted on me, I do not understand the chemical processes behind it all. I want to know about burns from open flames, burns from hot metals and plastics, cigarette burns and scalding. I want to know about acid burns and even rug and rope burn. 

\--

His instruction is comprehensive, and he is a patient teacher. He tells me how to identify what sort of burn it is, what is happening subdermally, and then he lets me try it out on the pig. By the end of it the whole room smells like bacon and my heart is beating from all the new knowledge. 

These lessons are the highlight of my week. I am finally getting the education I missed out on in my youth. On the other hand, he is delighted somebody will listen to him speak uninterruptedly about things he is passionate about. We have covered poisons, burns, bone fractures and bullet wounds and he has taken the opportunity to show off each time, dancing around the room animatedly. 

I know the lesson is over when he pushes my hair to the side and presses a kiss to the pulse-point on my neck. Knowledge is his aphrodisiac – and mine, and that armchair is soft and fits the two of us perfectly. I kiss his lips and his hands grow increasingly less steady, his ambidexterity disappears, and then I am the teacher, until I no longer am. 

Because I could write volumes about him, about each mole, about each freckle, about each dimple and pucker of his skin. I have studied him, not with my pencil but with my kisses. And I continue to study him and the changing geography of his skin. If he is my pathologist, I am his cartographer and I map out each fold and each curve with my hands. I think he understands this is how I love him, how I study him. And so the symbiosis occurs.


End file.
